A Bourdieusian Interpretation of Gender, Space, and the Body: Golf Clubs and Wealth in Mexico

• In Event: 577 - Section on Body and Embodiment Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 01. Bodies and Gender

Abstract

The present article combines Bourdieu’s analysis of embodiment, feminist arguments, and an analysis of spatial practices to demonstrate how gender is the product of embodied power dynamics that form durable but not unchangeable social identities. These ideas are examined in the affluent world of golf clubs in contemporary Mexico City. I argue that this sport offers a strategic site to demonstrate how a gender order not only exerts its effects on lower-class individuals, but how it also bodily frames social dynamics among groups with considerable economic and social power. My work, therefore, is concerned with the way class and gender operate among upper-class individuals in Mexico. This study represents one of the first attempts to explore the embodiment of gender dispositions in wealthy sport clubs in Latin America.

Author

• Hugo Ceron-Anaya, Lehigh University